New Orleans homeless camp cleared

[flashl]

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Inhabitants of a New Orleans tent city that attracted donations, drugs and despair for nearly a year were cleared Thursday by a nonprofit group, which says it now must find lasting solutions to a doubling of homelessness since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.

The encampment under a stretch of freeway overpass known as the Claiborne Avenue bridge was erased during an all-night operation by UNITY of Greater New Orleans, which used the promise of shelter beds to get the 46 men and women to move. As people gathered their belongings, their mattresses and tents were disposed of in the morning light.

"At no time in the richest country in the world should hundreds of people be living underneath an interstate" highway, said New Orleans City Councilmember Arnie Fielkow, one of several officials who held a news conference to call the effort a success.

Yet, since October 2007 the camp grew in the heart of the city, first establishing itself at a plaza in the shadow of City Hall. By the time state and city officials fenced off the area and made its inhabitants leave, the camp had become populated with as many as 350 residents who used pup tents and their wits to survive.

...

Kegel cautioned that the city was still populated with an estimated 12,000 homeless people, double its pre-Katrina number. Many more live in substandard and overcrowded housing, in a city where rents have increased by about 40% since the disaster.

USA Today

[Trillo]

1. Interesting (screwed up) logic.

They should have homes, rents have increased 40%, so lets kick them out of their camps where they are living.

[bobbolink]

2. How many suicides will result from this?

WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE???????